How are translators embedded? Textual and peritextual analysis of Li Yü’s Twelve Towers in the nineteenth century

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to employ embeddedness theory – focusing on how human activities are embedded in society and institutions – as a theoretical and methodological groundwork for a view of translation as social practice. This aim is pursued through a case study of the translations of Chinese scholar Li Yü’s collection of novellas, Twelve Towers (Shi’er lou), in nineteenth-century Britain, produced by Sir John Francis Davis, Samuel Birch, and Robert Kennaway Douglas. The study finds that embeddedness theory provides a hermeneutic stance for understanding translation practice, and that peritextual analysis can complement embeddedness theory descriptively. Prospects for future collaboration of embeddedness theory and translation studies are promising, and a more profound analysis of the intersection of the two disciplines will foster exciting discoveries and stimulate mutually beneficial developments.

KEYWORDS:

• Embeddedness
• peritext
• sociology
• British sinology
• Li Yü

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 To date, there have been five English translations of Twelve Towers. In addition to the three translations made by Davis, Birch, and Douglas, there are another two versions produced by Nathan Mao (1942–2015) and Patrick Hanan (1927–2014). In 1973, Mao translated “Hegui lou” (鶴歸樓 The House of the Returning Crane) into English and published it in the Renditions journal that same year. In 1979, Mao’s full translation of Twelve Towers was published by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. This marks the first complete translation of the novel collection. In 1998, Columbia University Press published Hanan’s A Tower for the Summer Heat, which included the translations of six stories in Twelve Towers. These two recent translations were frequently cited by scholars in discussions of Li Yü and Twelve Towers due to their wider availability.

2 Cognitive embeddedness’s emphasis on pre-reflective knowledge corresponds to Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of doxa, “the universe of the undiscussed” ([1972] 1977, 277), which also foregrounds actors’ institutive understandings shaped by social conventions. But the two concepts differ in that Bourdieu marks out that there are certain invisible rules, doxa, that influence agents, whereas cognitive embeddedness stresses the need to first acknowledge that the influence originates from cognitive structure (Zukin and DiMaggio 1990, 5), and that a full understanding of the influence can only be achieved by delineating the regularities of the network contexts (16–17).

3 For instance, it is recorded that Davis accompanied George Staunton to negotiate a “raging” issue with Chinese officials in 1814 (Wong 2015, 175).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China, Code 19CZW029.

Notes on contributors

Chenlin Wei

Betty Chenlin Wei is an Associate Professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Xi’an Jiaotong University. Her research interests include Chinese studies, theatre studies, comparative literature, and literary criticism.

Barbara Jiawei Li

Barbara Jiawei Li is a Lecturer at the Department of Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her main research interests include translation history, translation theory, and performance studies.